Hand of God Threatens to Thwart G.O.P.

If God is a Republican (and can there be any doubt?), he has evidently decided to put his fellow flag-wavers to the test. On the eve of a carefully scripted national convention that the G.O.P. has been banking on to persuade skeptical Americans that Mitt Romney is a living, breathing human—rather than a battery-operated android—the party is now facing the prospect of going head-to-head with a hurricane in prime time.

Day one of the Tampa gabfest has already been effectively cancelled, and big questions remain about days two, three, and four. With Tropical Storm Isaac evidently heading for the waters off the Gulf Coast, where it may well turn into a hurricane, and with New Orleans having been added to the possible-impact cone, the G.O.P. convention has been relegated to the status of second lead. Government forecasters are currently predicting landfall sometime on Wednesday evening, which is when Paul Ryan is set to address the convention. By the time Romney takes the stage on Thursday night, the storm may well have blown over without doing too much damage, but who knows? Certainly not the schedulers from Team Romney and the Republican National Committee, who are desperately trying to reshuffle their lineup.

It’s very bad luck for the Republicans, but, in part, they only have themselves to blame. In scheduling their late-August get-together for a low-lying city in coastal Florida, they were tempting fate. The Tampa Bay Timesreported back in May that local and federal officials in Tampa were sufficiently concerned about the weather to start planning for the possibility of big storm disrupting the convention. Here is what the story said.

This week, state leaders will game-plan a convention hurricane, one that could ruin months of planning and waste millions in spending — not to mention deal a harsh blow to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which will use the event to kick-start its stretch run. Those high stakes are the reason emergency officials picked the RNC as the subject of their annual disaster drill.

“If it’s in the realm of possibility, it’s something we need to at least plan for,” said Bryan Koon, director of the Florida emergency management division.

As the Fix’s Aaron Blake, who directed me to this story, pointed out, G.O.P. officials were willing to take a gamble on Tampa because Florida is the key swing state in the country, and the I-4 corridor, which runs from Tampa to St. Petersburg, is a key swing area. (In 2004, it went for Bush; in 2008, it went for Obama.) But with heavy winds and rain forecast for the next couple of days, as well as the lingering threat of tornadoes, how many Floridians will be paying close attention to what happens in Tampa? Not as many as the boys in Beantown had been hoping for.

On the grounds that little really newsworthy happens at the conventions, and that most Americans would prefer to stick with their regular diet of reality shows and violent dramas, the entertainment networks—ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC—had already scaled back their coverage plans to an hour a night in prime time. Just last week, before the hurricane watch began, the networks informed the R.N.C. that they weren’t planning to show any live coverage on Monday night, when Ann Romney had been expected to speak. Team Romney promptly switched her to Tuesday, where she will share the stage with Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey.

With all eyes on the skies, the Mittster and other senior G.O.P. figures appeared, as planned, on the Sunday political shows and tried to talk up the coming days. Speaking to Chris Wallace, on “Fox News Sunday,” Romney gave little away about his big speech, but did say that in writing it he was seeking the inspiration of his late father. (Could that mean he is set to announce he will release twelve years of tax returns? Surely not.) On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senator Marco Rubio, the local boy wonder who will introduce Romney on Thursday, spoke glowingly of the G.O.P. candidate-elect, saying he was an inspiration and a role model, and adding: “Everywhere he has gone, in his community and in his church, he has made it better.”

Evidently, somebody had forgotten to inform Rubio that Paul Ryan had already nabbed the Veep slot. I switched over to NBC, where a dimly lit Jeb Bush was making some more serious points about how Romney needed to shift the focus back to the economy and job-creation. David Gregory asked him about the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, which showed Obama/Biden leading Romney/Ryan by twenty-five points among Hispanic voters. If Romney talked about growth and opportunity, he would start to make some inroads into this lead, Bush averred, and then he added this warning to his fellow-Republicans: “But we have to have a better tone going forward, sure. You can’t ask people to join your party and also send the message that they are not wanted.”

When and if the convention gets going, Team Romney will be trying to take Bush’s advice. On Tuesday night, Sher Valenzuela, a Latina businesswomen who is running for lieutenant governor of Delaware, is slated to be one of the speakers. But will anybody be watching?

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.